Walker (1987)

WHO: Alex Cox directed and co-edited this.

WHAT: The first American (co-)production to be shot on location (for the most part) in Nicaragua.  A truly bizarre film about a bizarre piece of 19th-century history, it stars Ed Harris as William Walker, the mercenary filibuster from Tennessee who tried to make Nicaragua become one of the United States the way Texas (among others) became one: through Anglo settlement and conquest.

Such a brutal history makes for a sometimes brutal movie, and director Cox drew inspiration from violent Western epics like The Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West to create his most lavishly morbid film.  But he also broke all the rules of period pieces by connecting the historical events to the contemporaneous Reagan-era policies in the region, in a way I wouldn't want to spoil for those who have not yet seen this.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie, at 11:59 PM.

WHY: Walker is the capper to the next-to-last MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS triple-bill of 2013, and it's a doozy. Starting this summer with the MiDNITES showing of Dario Argento's Tenebrae these three-prong events have involved a crawl from a Castro Theatre double-bill to the nearby Roxie for the final show. This will be my first time embarking one of these crawls, and I couldn't be more excited for the line-up.

First up is my favorite big-budget Hollywood movie in recent memory The Lone Ranger, which I wrote about when it was still in cinemas this past August. I very much look forward to an upcoming piece on the film by my friend and fellow fan Ryland Walker Knight, but in the meantime I'm excited to attend the my first 35mm viewing of a film that was shot largely on 35mm by Bojan Bazelli (cinematographer for Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst and Abel Ferrara's King of New York and Body Snatchers among other films on his very interesting resume), but that has until tonight only shown at digital-only theatres within San Francisco.

The second program in the trio is Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, one of my favorite films of all time but one I have never seen on a truly huge screen like the Castro's (it frequently played at the Red Vic when that was still a going concern). It was Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1996 article on this film that made me first aware of a sub-genre known as the "acid western" that describes it, Walker, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Monte Hellman's The Shooting and other films, and that tonight's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS event borrows for its title.

As far as I know, Rosenbaum has thus far not weighed in (or perhaps even seen) The Lone Ranger, so I don't know how he would react to it being grouped with the other two films. But I think it might just work. It has a hallucinatory quality and a sense of existence as a counterpoint to mainstream filmmaking (though its status as a highly-budgeted Disney release surely complicates this quite a bit; the friction here may help account for its poor showing with critics).

Obviously tonight's triple-bill is meant to highlight the approaches toward portraying the clash of Anglo-Saxon and indigenous American cultures in the eighteenth century, in ways that draw from and rebel against the traditional ways Hollywood filmmakers have portrayed this topic in Westerns during their heyday in the 1910s through 1970s. It's probably a coincidence that this triple-bill is occurring in the middle of the 38th annual American Indian Film Festival, which is one of the country's best showcases for films made by and about the modern descendents of native peoples from this continent. If you've never sampled this excellent festival, I highly recommend doing so before its screenings end tomorrow. Also probably a coincidence is the Sunday evening 16mm screening of Kent MacKenzie's unique 1961 film The Exiles at the Berkeley Underground Film Society. I recommend that too.

HOW:All films tonight screen via 35mm prints.

Night On Earth (1991)

 

WHO: Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this. Gena Rowlands appears in the first of its five segments.

WHAT: One of the more neglected films from the director of such independent-film classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai as well as the upcoming Only Lovers Left Alive, it's also one that, through its construction of five vignettes set in five separate cities across the United States and Europe, demonstrates the scope of Jarmusch's insider-cinephilia through its location and casting choices, many of which are meant to pay tribute to favorite directors through his choices of location and cast. Working backwards longitudinally (and chronologically), the Helsinki episode features actors known for working with Jarmusch's friends Aki & Mika Kaurismäki- and the late, great Matti Pellonpää even plays a character named Mika. Rome memorably involves actor/director Roberto Begnini, whom Jarmusch had worked with on Down By Law and the initial Coffee and Cigarettes short film, but also has Paolo Bonacelli playing a priest, a twisted homage to his role in Pasolini's Salò. The Paris segment casts Isaach De Bankolé, who had by this point already filmed performances in the first two features directed by Jarmusch's assistant director on Down By Law, Claire Denis. And the New York segment features Gianacarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez, both actors heavily associated with the work of Jarmusch's former NYU schoolmate Spike Lee. This paragraph is long enough so I'll deal with the fifth vignette in the "WHY" section just below...

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 9:05.

WHY: Jarmusch wrote the Los Angeles taxi passenger part for Gena Rowlands as a tribute to her performances in films made with her husband John Cassavetes, one of Jarmusch's filmmaker idols. On the supplemental materials for the Criterion DVD of Night On Earth Jarmusch says he was honored that Rowlands agreed to make his film mark her return to film work after the death of Cassavetes in 1989. However, this is contradicted by a New York Times article claiming that her performance in Lasse Hallström's Once Around was shot in January of 1990, when compared to the Night on Earth commentary track by cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound man Drew Kunin, who indicate that the reason her scene begins at the Santa Monica Airport rather than a larger one was because of security issues relating to the First Gulf War.

No matter. Having Rowlands play a casting agent soon after her husband's death was surely a great honor for Jarmusch nonetheless. And it's a rare privilege for Frisco Bay audiences to be able to see Rowlands on the Castro screen on two consecutive Wednesdays; her Oscar-nominated performance in Cassavetes' 1980 film  Gloria screens there in 35mm on July 24th. I can't recall the last time this particular Cassavetes film screened in a local theatre and would be shocked if it was sometime in the past ten years.

HOW: On a double bill with Jarmusch's previous film Mystery Train, both on 35mm prints.